Blogs & Wikis

Use blogs and wikis to facilitate formative and peer assessment

While blogs and wikis can help under-confident students to practice their writing, activities allowing students to upload content to a blog or a wiki are also beneficial for assessment. Students have the ability to see and comment on the work of their peers and benchmark their progress against the rest of the group. The act of writing on a blog or a wiki encourages students to reflect on their learning, develop their writing abilities and formulate their own opinions by providing peer feedback.

Asking students to contribute regularly to a blog or wiki also enables tutors to monitor engagement with the task and provide support for those students who might be having difficulty. Being able to provide targeted, formative feedback on students’ work at the point where they most need it is a valuable way of keeping them on track.

The blog and wiki tools in myUCA enables tutors to assess the contributions of each student and are ideal for supporting group work through online collaboration.